


The Caged Lion

by Lady_in_Red



Series: The Lion of Lannister [4]
Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen, post-season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-29
Updated: 2016-07-29
Packaged: 2018-07-27 13:23:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,315
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7619749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lady_in_Red/pseuds/Lady_in_Red
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jaime's journey continues after burning Cersei's letter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Caged Lion

The ambush came two days north of Moat Cailin, and while Jaime had gone down fighting in the Whispering Wood, this time he was hit from behind while taking a piss. He woke up lashed to a horse with a bag over his head. None of the voices around him were familiar. Jaime wasn’t sure if that meant the few men he'd brought north from Moat Cailin were dead or if they were fruitlessly searching the woods for him.

Either way, they’d proven useless, just as Bronn had warned when Jaime left him at Darry. Guarding Lady Amerei’s bed had seemed a sweeter deal to the sellsword, and, his head throbbing and his arms bound, Jaime had to admit that Bronn’s way of thinking had its merits.

When his captors stopped, one shoved him off the horse as if he were nothing more than a sack of grain. Jaime landed in the slushy snow just as gracelessly, his arms too numb to break his fall. His golden hand, hidden under a glove, dug into his stomach. Perhaps they didn’t know who he was, though Jaime suspected that Jon Snow had lured him north to make him a hostage against his sister’s good behavior. A bold move, not at all honorable, but the boy was a bastard after all, even if he was Ned Stark’s.

“What the fuck is that?” The deep, guttural voice sounded familiar, but Jaime couldn’t place it.

“I had orders.” This voice was closer, wavering under the force of the other man’s displeasure.

“Your orders were to watch and report back, not take captives,” the first voice growled.

Heavy footsteps moved toward Jaime and the bag was yanked from his head. Jaime blinked up into the bright light, the man above him nothing but a blur of dark hair and slightly paler skin.

“You fucking cunts, that’s the bloody Kingslayer.”

Jaime’s vision cleared, and the face above him was unmistakable. The Hound, Sandor Clegane.

 

* * *

 

Jaime passed out not long after he was shoved into a dank chamber inside a root cellar. The door was bolted into the rock with heavy iron hinges. He explored the chamber as much as he could in the pitch blackness, but there wasn’t much to it. A nest of straw bedding and two buckets, one filled with brackish water.

When he woke, the darkness felt heavier, closer. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled with awareness. No sound betrayed another person’s presence, but Jaime was not alone.

“Who are you?” His voice was hoarse and his mouth dry. He must have slept for hours.

“I have had many names, as have you.” A woman. No, a girl, and highborn from the formality of her speech. Northern, he thought, though there was a lilting hint of the Free Cities in her speech.

Not Brienne. That was too much to ask, to stumble upon her, even if it meant being her captive again.

“What do you want?” He was helpless here, could feel the weight of the chains Clegane had locked around his ankles. Perhaps they didn’t know how to shackle a one-handed man, because his arms were free. That was a mistake, one he would not hesitate to exploit.

“Why are you here?”

The voice was almost unnaturally emotionless, but so controlled that Jaime could feel something dark and dangerous beneath it. He’d been trained to recognize threats, his instincts honed by decades protecting a madman and a drunken fool. This voice made him squirm as it bounced off the stone walls, the slight echo making it difficult to pinpoint her location.

“Your men hit me over the head. I had no quarrel with you.” Without knowing who she was, what her aims were, Jaime could not placate her.

“Perhaps I have a quarrel with you.” That time she betrayed a hint of emotion. Rage. Barely contained, and seemingly coming from the opposite side of the chamber from the last time, yet he hadn’t heard her move.

“Many do.” Jaime strove for arrogance and heard only resignation. This one could gut him before he could raise a hand (his only hand) to defend himself.

“What brings a Lannister to the North?”

Arrogance. Stupidity. Rebellion. Orders from the queen. The misplaced faith and trust of a blue-eyed maid. But he was no longer sure that Jon Snow was behind his capture. Snow would know why he was here, and Snow would never trust the Hound to do his dirty work.

“What do you think?” His voice was a haughty growl.

She did not reply.

The silence enveloped him, heavy with accusations of scheming and betrayal. No movement, no breath, no murky glimpse of pale skin or the flash of a shining blade. He’d thought being chained in a pen for months, Robb Stark’s direwolf eyeing him like a bloody joint of meat, was torture, but he was wrong. Torture was darkness, quiet, and uncertainty. The girl could kill him at any time, for any reason or none at all.

And Jaime was completely at her mercy.

 

* * *

Jaime slept fitfully, ate when he smelled food, and waited. It wasn’t the confinement that wore him down, nor the darkness that hollowed him out. It was the passing hours, flowing inexorably onward while he was stuck here, out of the light and out of time.

The girl was his only visitor, and she came infrequently, while he slept. When Jaime woke, he could always tell if she was there. The air thickened somehow, and his skin crawled with gooseflesh. She asked the same question every time. “Why are you here?”

Jaime kept his answers flippant, even rude. The truth was all he had left, and even that was light on water, flame in the dark. It flickered and changed depending on how he approached it.

Finally she stopped asking. Her presence was enough. But he did not break. Not for a voice in the dark. Until he woke with his only hand chained to the wall.

The girl was there, but she was not silent. He could hear her breathing, the scuff of her boots on the packed dirt floor when she shifted positions. And the soft hiss of steel against leather.

“Who are you?” Jaime was in no position to make demands, but with naked steel drawn against him, he wanted to know who swung the sword and why before it fell. And if he could, take an enemy with him, fight his way back into the light one more time.

The girl did not answer, but her breathing sped up. Something had changed. He’d said terrible things, provoked her every way he knew, and never once had she reacted. She’d never chained him to the wall before. Certainty settled over him. This was the end.

“A woman. I came here for a woman.” The words were out before he knew he was going to speak, and then he couldn’t stop, the words tumbling out, one pebble triggering a landslide. “Brienne. They told me she was lost, and I came. A blind fool, walking right into a trap. I don’t even know if she’s really gone, but I failed regardless. I’ve failed everyone I ever loved, why not her, too?”

“No.” One word, soft, broken. And not the girl’s voice.

Jaime lunged forward, pain tearing through his arm as he reached the end of his chain. “Brienne?”

Footsteps receded from him, metal struck the stone wall, and a gloved hand thumped the wooden door. The door cracked open, flooding the chamber with moonlight, nearly blinding him. But he knew the breadth of her shoulders and the battered blue-grey plate that covered them. The halo of her blonde hair was unmistakable as she rushed through the door while his chains held him back.

Brienne was alive. She was with his captors. And she’d left him alone again in the dark.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Yeah, I know, the show wouldn't do multiple scenes in the dark, after Arya and the Waif's fight. Indulge me.


End file.
